The Ecstasy of Influence

by Jonathan Lethem

  The subjects included, always, my books and myself. I’m a too-willing explainer, a penchant useful in a father of a toddler but embarrassing otherwise. “All I do is go around trapped in a bubble of regard,” I said somewhere. “A book tour is a solipsistic nightmare.” I spoke these words while on book tour, in a newspaper’s offices. Even here, now, I’m explaining my explaining. “I don’t know how to stop,” Coltrane complained to Miles Davis, who replied, “Take the horn out of your mouth.” My fascination at this anecdote suggests I don’t know how to take the horn out of my mouth. I’ve given enough interviews that any striking notion I’ve ever managed aloud I’ve also paraphrased awkwardly a few dozen times, and contradicted outright another five or ten, a combination of my eagerness to tell in-person listeners what they want to hear and my discomfort at repeating myself, at least repeating myself exactly. Seeking variations—and to light up the jaded eyes of bored journalists—I’ve been variously flippant, morbid, and no doubt teeth-grindingly sincere on every topic ever pushed my way. The only approach I neglect is to bow out, to ignore a question or scratch an interview; I show up too often and say too much. The Internet acts as Funes the Memorious—a place where remarks go to never die. It’s scattered with my blurry paraphrases, like twelfth-generation photocopies, of things I said a bit better five or twenty years earlier.

  Maybe newcomers could just forage and assemble whichever interview replies they prefer. Eager to find me swearing allegiance to metafiction or Brooklyn, or disavowing these same things? It wouldn’t be much trouble. Your Lethem may be more interesting to you than mine, perhaps even to me.

  This piece, commissioned for an anthology of writers’ book-tour humiliations, was slight but opened a door. Breaking a taboo against acknowledging my curiosity about my public avatar, it made a tiny step toward this book.

  Bowels of Compassion

  Book-touring, in the United States, is a slog. The process is much less romantic, so much less a coronation, than some might imagine. It’s churlish to complain about the effort of one’s publisher to bring a book to the light of an audience, and I won’t complain here: I’ll book-tour again this year, and I’ll see many friends—booksellers, interviewers, and my publisher’s remote operatives—acquired in earlier rounds. But the net effect is a slog through a morass of Sartrean repetitions. I begin tours cheerfully and end them as a zombie, hoping not to be ungracious in any number of dazed moments.

  I think of my escorts. Not the type found in ads in the back of weekly newspapers, but “literary escorts,” those local sprites schlepping writers in and out of airports, hotel lobbies, radio stations, and bookstores. Escorts are not the cause of mortification but the witnesses to it. They’re the human link, the local flavor. I think of my escort in Minnesota, who drove a battered Toyota, its dashboard decorated with gopher skulls and dried branches of herb, and who escorted authors to support finishing an epic, book-length poem on the subject of road-kill. I remember my Vietnam-vet escort in Kansas City, bravely limping with his cane around the car to open my side door. I remember others and love them all.

  I think of the radio. The radio is, for me, the void. A tour consists of waking at five, breakfasting in the airport, landing in a new city, and dropping one’s bags in a hotel room, then being whisked to a radio station to make a nine or ten a.m. talk show, where a jaded local host who’s read only a summary of your book and mispronounces your name will ask you questions about your mother and father and whether you know anyone really famous. Later that night you’ll see local friends, you’ll read aloud to live humans who’ve put aside part of their lives to come and see you stand at a podium. If you’re lucky you’ll have a nap in your hotel, you’ll be treated to an elaborate meal—sometimes a good one—and you’ll have time to figure out which city you’re in. But not before you’ve been put on the radio. When you’re talking on the radio you’ve had a flight and a coffee in a paper cup and a crumb of something. You’ve had time to empty your bladder—but only your bladder. Then you reply to questions asked by someone uninterested in the answers, into the whispery microphones of a padded booth. Your listeners, if they exist, are invisible, distant, and likely missed your name even if it was pronounced correctly. The radio is the void where you stare into your own soul on book tour and find nothing staring you back.

  Once, a particular escort in a particular city came together with the radio experience in a way which was not so much mortifying as edifyingly humbling. She was a big, rowdy, middle-aged blonde who had been, some years before, the lead anchorperson on the local news. She’d also obviously been stunningly beautiful in her youth. She reminded me, immediately and delightfully, of Gena Rowlands in the Cassavetes film Opening Night—a character modeled, in turn, on Bette Davis in All About Eve. That is to say, a real star, made insecure by age. What I couldn’t know was that her new job as escort—and I was evidently one of her very first authors—consisted, by design or accident, of a beautiful cure.

  We stopped at two or three radio stations that day, and one television station. It happened at the first stop and every stop to follow: She was received as a returning comet. From the receptionists, to the producers, to the technicians, to the interviewers themselves, all were in awe that she’d swept in—and I was a token at her side, a negligible presence. How good she looked! How they missed her! What a bimbo they’d replaced her with! How shocking that she’d been cut from the air just for aging—nobody in this business had any respect anymore for the true giants! By dint of my tour itinerary, prepared months before and thousands of miles away in an office in Manhattan, this titan of local media made her return tour of local outlets. They fell over themselves. Here was true fame, a face they’d gazed at five evenings a week for ten years. I might have been Rushdie, I might have been Roth, I might have been T. S. Eliot, it wouldn’t have mattered. She managed her courtiers graciously, and spoke forgivingly of the betrayal. “Oh, that’s just this business … nothing personal …”

  You out there: faceless army, tuned to morning talk. I know you’re there. I’ve got something to tell you. Those authors you hear at nine or ten in the morning, speaking so tenderly or ragefully of their childhood or broken marriage, or meticulously defending their book against this or that possible misunderstanding, or answering unexpected questions about their hair color or their pets, or explaining why no one will ever know the final truth about what resides in the human heart, you must know this: They are holding in a bowel movement.

  —Mortification, 2004

  Stops

  On Those Things My New Novel Forgot to Be About, Maybe

  For me, there’s a weird, unfathomable gulf—I almost wrote gulp—between the completion of a novel and its publication. Some days this duration feels interminable, as though the book has voyaged out like some spacecraft on a research mission, populated by forgotten losers like the ones in John Carpenter’s Dark Star, a craft cut loose by those who launched the thing and now grown irretrievable, bent by space and time into something distorted and not worth guiding home. Then there are other days, where the book might be a pitch that’s left your hand too soon, now burning toward home plate, whether to be met by a catcher’s mitt or the sweet part of the bat you can’t possibly know. Hopeless to regret it once you feel it slipping past your fingertips. Just watch. (That’s the gulp.) The weirdness is in that interlude where the book has quit belonging to you but doesn’t belong to anyone else yet, hasn’t been inscribed in all its rightness and wrongness by the scattershot embrace and disdain of the world. It’s a version of Schrödinger’s cat, unchangeably neither dead nor alive in its box.

  Sometimes, in that interlude, I find myself going over the collage of notes, the scraps of inspiration or non sequitur that I gathered up and clung to when there wasn’t yet anything else to believe in. I don’t outline books, or make systematic notes, nor draw up charts or character sketches, but I do accumulate shards of utterances, like a ransom note or early punk-rock flyer. That’s to say, I glue shit together
and stare at it, wishing for my book. I like glue. Once I start writing, I barely ever glance at the Frankenstein-scrapbook thing again. I don’t need to. Whatever I’ve written is a thousand percent more useful than what I’d imagined I’d write. Still, it can be strange afterward to recall the book I imagined before the real one came along to blot it out.

  Here’s an item from Reuter’s, headlined GERMANY: IMPOSSIBLE TO LOVE THE LITTLE GUY? NOT QUITE. “The Berlin Zoo came to the defense of a 3-month old polar bear cub named Knut, rejecting claims by animal rights campaigners that he should be killed by lethal injection because he has become too dependent on humans. The cub’s fate has gripped the capital since his birth in December, when he and his twin brother were rejected by their mother, a former circus bear.” Everything in this clipping fills me with awe, and now a certain ache of longing: How could I have failed to get Knut into my book? I should have written of nothing else. “A former circus bear”—what did Knut’s mother see in her cubs that repulsed her, or was she afraid that if she loved them they’d become circus bears as well? Was she clownish or acrobatic, did she come to love the greasepaint and the roar of the crowd? And then there’s the superb certainties of those activists, as fierce as any fundamentalist religion. “The hand-rearing had condemned the cub to a dysfunctional life,” according to Frank Albrecht, the lead activist. I can’t keep from wondering if Albrecht’s mother was a circus performer as well. Even the Berlin Zoo—I’ve wandered past its stink myself, thinking of David Bowie and U2, amazed by the German teenagers who panhandle and deal drugs outside the Zoo station of the Berlin subway.

  What book did I think I was going to write?

  Here’s a sentence from Adam Phillips’s essay “Nuisance Value,” in which he’s attempting to paraphrase George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London: “Criminals, Orwell seems to imply in the book, are the people we punish for being a nuisance; artists are the people we reward for being a nuisance; successful businessmen are criminals disguised as artists.” I could read that sentence a thousand times and not understand what it means, and yet it seems to explain every secret thing I’ve always suspected about contemporary existence, about our individual fates under the condition of “late capitalism” (or whatever our reality should be called); the sentence is like a John Ashbery poem to me in that way. I wanted to write a whole novel based on the sentence, but did I manage it? Maybe that’s what I liked about the Reuter’s wire piece about Knut: It seemed like it already was a novel based on the Adam Phillips sentence. The activists judged Knut to be a nuisance, not bear enough: He’d been reduced to criminal or homeless status by his dependency. Knut was Down and Out. The Zoo, defending him, elevated him to the status of an artist, an unprecedented, mongrel creation that while useless, and perhaps even dysfunctional, provided more than adequate “nuisance value.” The clipping had after all also mentioned that “The zoo is braced for crowds.” Money changes everything.

  “Perhaps such secrets, the secrets of everyone, were only expressed when the person laboriously dragged them into the light of the world, imposed them on the world, and made them part of the world’s experience. Without this effort, the secret place was merely a dungeon in which the person perished; without this effort, indeed, the entire world would merely be an uninhabitable darkness.” Those words are James Baldwin’s, from Another Country, and I collaged them into my notes, too—retyped them, actually, as I’ve just done again—wanting my book, whatever it was going to be, to live up to their challenge, to drag some small thing out into the light, out of the dungeon. And then I made up some characters, and put them in a story, and hammered out a few thousand sentences, tried to mete out surprise and delight, and got stuck with that odd novelist’s burden, of spending so much time with my stick figures that they seem painfully real and deliciously dear to me. But really, who knows whether I’ve done any of what I most wanted to do? My book is a starship drifting loose from orbit, a pitch whose trajectory was shaped by the palm and fingers of my hand but now subjects itself to the mysteries of the air, beyond my fingertips. It’s a meal I cooked but can’t taste myself. I want the reader to taste what I first tasted in those fragments and clippings, my pathetic laminated plan for the future, like the collage of scenes of middle-class family life the parolee James Caan shows off to Tuesday Weld in the heartbreaking first-date scene in Michael Mann’s Thief. My hope is that once I began the carpentry of storytelling I still remembered to pry open the gaps where the light could flood in, where Knut might roam, even if Knut went unnamed.

  The great actor and director John Cassavetes, discussing what he rated as a failed performance by a well-known actor in an acclaimed film he hated—Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now—made a remark which haunts me in its implications: He said he thought Sheen might have been able to do something with the role, as badly written as he considered it to be, if as an actor he’d been allowed to insert some “stops” into the performance. What he meant by “stops,” I believe, were simply gaps, or hesitations, actorly silences. Moments when thoughts left unexplored by the words themselves could be allowed to flood in. This possibility has always seemed to me a beautiful one, first for its craftsmanlike insight into the performer’s art, but also in its suggestion that even a despised and oppressive text, a piece of junk like Cassavetes felt Apocalypse Now to be, might be worth this attempt at salvage. In other words, even a dishonest world might be worth trying to inhabit honestly. For isn’t the actor’s plight strangely like our own, or Knut’s, dropped into a world scripted before we were born and against our wishes?

  —Powell’s Books Blog, 2009

  Advertisements for Norman Mailer

  Salvage from an Infatuation

  1.

  There once was a boy who fell in love with Norman Mailer, a writer who called himself “Aquarius.” Call this boy Aquarius-Nul, then. The name suggested all utopian possibilities the boy had glimpsed, born in the middle of the ’60s to avidly countercultural parents. Their world, which he’d taken for the world, was a show that was closing: the dawning of an Age, but no age to follow the dawning. This boy’s own stories, when they came, painted his parents’ tribe as a withered race of superheroes, Super Goat Men and Women, who’d at least been large once in their lives. Aquarius-Nul’s uptight cohort sometimes seemed inclined not even to try, only to mock such attempts. (Aquarius-Nul was as uptight as any of them. Call him A-Nul, maybe.)

  2.

  When Aquarius-Nul, who favored outlaw or outcaste identities (the Beats, the science-fiction writers), glanced at the then-present Mount Rushmore of U.S. writing, made of the Big Jews and Updike, Mailer was the only alluring prospect. For the teenage Aquarius-Nul, a major American novelist bragging of interest in graffiti, underground film, marijuana, and space travel was irresistible. Even better, Mailer was the only head on that Rushmore who nodded to the value of the outlaw or outcaste identities (the Beats, and science fiction). That Mailer was further a Jew and a Brooklynite yet had shrugged off those legacy subject matters made him, for Aquarius-Nul, who’d want to believe he could do the same, too good to be true. In fact, others on Rushmore would sustain Aquarius-Nul’s interest before long. But not before Aquarius-Nul had burned through Mailer’s whole shelf, sometimes in delirious wonder, sometimes guiltily bored, and, strangely, often both at once.

  3.

  Enough with “Aquarius-Nul.” (How could Mailer have stood it, typing “Aquarius” or “the Prisoner” or “the reporter” or even “Mailer” what must have been so many thousands of times, instead of settling for “I”?) And why so much self-regarding throat-clearing before getting to any journalistic subject—why put Aquarius-Nul in front of Mailer himself? Helpless tribute, I suppose, to the all-time ego king. Yet let this be my chance to say that Mailer’s unfashionably preening brand of self-consciousness seems to me to be crucial in the formation of another, lately fashionable brand—the Eggers of Heartbreaking Work or the Wallace of A Supposedly Fun Thing—which, inoculated with savage undercutting doubt, c
onceals the lineage.

  4.

  Challenged once by a friend to name a single immortal literary character from postwar fiction—someone to rival Sherlock Holmes or Madame Bovary in terms of bleed-through to popular consciousness—I blurted out, “Norman Mailer!” I was halfway serious. Mailer, running hard against his limits at inventing a new form of novel as large as his ambition or claims, invented, by means of Advertisements for Myself and the third-person narrator of his journalistic books, by his television appearances, wife-stabbing, and so forth, the character of the public Mailer instead—and triumphed. “Mailer finally got around to writing encyclopedic novels during a period when, as a novelist, he no longer really mattered, when, in fact, novels no longer mattered as they did during the modern era. For a time, Mailer managed to leverage this anachronism into a journalistic career based on a residual novelistic promise.”—Loren Glass, Authors Inc.: Literary Celebrity in the Modern United States, 1880–1980. Fair enough: That catches exactly what it felt like to be let down by Ancient Evenings or Harlot’s Ghost. But for those of us to whom the novel matters as much as anything ever mattered to anyone, the episode of Mailer and “the novel” was a quarter-century drama of bluff and impotence just as good as the great white novel he couldn’t harpoon. For wasn’t it transparent to the utmost and from the start—in Advertisements for Myself—that Mailer couldn’t pull it off? Well, I had the benefit of hindsight; who knows what I’d have expected from Mailer if I’d encountered the drama in real time. In hindsight, Mailer looked in the late ’50s to have become a radar detector for the onset of the postmodern novel—as he had for the postmodern cultural condition generally—in his declared topics, his appetite to engulf every dissident impulse and the whole atmosphere of paranoia and revelation that saturated the ’60s, though he delivered barely any fiction to reflect it, in his predictions in essays like “Superman Comes to the Supermarket”; in his self-annihilating advocacy of Burroughs’s Naked Lunch; in his desperate, dashed-off forays in Why Are We in Vietnam? and An American Dream, and so on. The reason Mailer couldn’t arrive at a satisfactory postmodern style (even as he saw his one firm achievement in The Naked and the Dead mummified by ironic treatments of his war by Heller, Vonnegut, and Pynchon) was because postmodernism as an art practice extended from modernism, to which Mailer had never authentically responded in the first place. This might have been Mailer’s dirty secret: He was still back with James T. Farrell’s Studs Lonigan in the soul of his aesthetics, even as the rest of his intelligence raced madly downfield, sometimes sprinting decades past his contemporaries.